Women in the Polar Night: Christiane Ritter and Sigri Sandberg

I’m continuing a Nonfiction November focus with reviews of two recently (re-)released memoirs about women spending time in the Arctic north of Norway. I enjoy reading about survival in extreme situations – it’s the best kind of armchair traveling because you don’t have to experience the cold and privation for yourself.

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (1938; English text, 1954)

[Translated by Jane Degras]

In 1934, Ritter, an Austrian painter, joined her husband Hermann for a year in Spitsbergen. He’d participated in a scientific expedition and caught the Arctic bug, it seems, for he stayed on to fish and hunt. They shared a small, remote hut with a Norwegian trapper, Karl. Ritter was utterly unprepared for the daily struggle, having expected a year’s cozy retreat: “I could stay by the warm stove in the hut, knit socks, paint from the window, read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content.” Before long she was disabused of her rosy vision. “It’s a ghastly country, I think to myself. Nothing but water, fog, and rain.” The stove failed. Dry goods ran out; they relied on fresh seal meat. Would they get enough vitamins? she worried. Every time Hermann and Karl set off hunting, leaving her alone in the hut, she feared they wouldn’t return. And soon the 132 straight days of darkness set in.

I was fascinated by the details of Ritter’s daily tasks, but also by how her perspective on the landscape changed. No longer a bleak wilderness, it became a tableau of grandeur. “A deep blue-green, the mountains rear up into a turquoise-coloured sky. From the mountaintops broad glaciers glittering in the sun flow down into the fjord.” She thought of the Arctic almost as a site of spiritual pilgrimage, where all that isn’t elemental falls away. “Forgotten are all externals; here everything is concerned with simple being.” The year is as if outside of time: she never reminisces about her life back home, and barely mentions their daughter. By the end you see that the experience has changed her: she’ll never fret over trivial things again. She lived to age 103 (only dying in 2000), so clearly the time in the Arctic did her no harm.

Ritter wrote only this one book. A travel classic, it has never been out of print in German but has been for 50 years in the UK. Pushkin Press is reissuing the English text on the 21st with a foreword by Sara Wheeler, a few period photographs and a hand-drawn map by Neil Gower.

My rating:

With thanks to Pushkin Press for the free copy for review.

Notes: Michelle Paver drew heavily on this book when creating the setting for Dark Matter. (There’s even a bear post outside the Ritters’ hut.)

An Ode to Darkness by Sigri Sandberg (2019)

[Translated by Siân Mackie]

Ritter’s book is a jumping-off point for Norwegian journalist Sandberg’s investigation of darkness as both a physical fact and a cultural construct. She travels alone from her home in Oslo to her cabin in the mountains at Finse, 400 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Ninety percent of Norway’s wildlife sleeps through the winter, and she often wishes she could hibernate as well. Although she only commits to five days in the far north compared to Ritter’s year, she experiences the same range of emotions, starting with a primitive fear of nature and the dark.

It is a fundamental truth that darkness does not exist from an astronomical standpoint. Happy fact. I’m willing to accept this. I try to find it comforting, helpful. But I still struggle to completely believe that darkness does not actually exist. Because what does it matter to a small, poorly designed human whether darkness is real or perceived? And what about the black holes in the universe, what about dark matter, what about the night sky and the threats against it, and … and now I’m exhausted. I’m done for the day. I feel so small, and I’m tired of being afraid.

Over the course of the book she talks to scientists about the human need for sleep and sunshine, discusses solitude and dark sky initiatives, and quotes from a number of poets, especially Jon Fosse, “Norway’s greatest writer,” who often employs metaphors of light and dark: “Deep inside me / … it was like the empty darkness was shining”.

In occasional passages labeled “Christiane” Sandberg also recounts fragments of Ritter’s experiences. I read Sandberg’s book first, so these served as a tantalizing introduction to A Woman in the Polar Night. “Is there anywhere as silent as a white winter plateau on a windless day? And how long can anyone spend alone before they start to feel, like Christiane did, as if their very being is disintegrating?”

This is just the sort of wide-ranging nonfiction I love; it intersperses biographical and autobiographical information with scientific and cultural observations.

[Another recent book tries to do a similar thing but is less successful – partially due to the author’s youthful optimism, but also due to the rambly, shallow nature of the writing. (My review will be in the November 29th issue of the Times Literary Supplement.)]

I know I’d struggle with the 22+ hours of darkness a day, too. To an extent Sandberg is used to it; TF found that incomers struggle with the darkness much more than Norwegians who’ve experienced it all their lives. I’m trying to cope better with winter this year with the help of a daylight alarm clock that gradually gets brighter and then wakes us up to blackbird song, plus vitamin B and D pills (all recommended in this interview Paul Cheney did with Horatio Clare: http://halfmanhalfbook.co.uk/book-musings/interview-with-horatio-clare/). So far I think it’s helping a bit.

I’d sleep past 8 (or forever) every day if I had no alarms! My mother always wakes up at 4 or 5 and has done for decades now. Perhaps one day I’ll follow in her footsteps. Our “Lumie bodyclock” was a rather expensive solution, but it felt good to do something about SAD.

I have seen many different definitions of “Arctic” so I guess that is fair, although personally I would have called it “High alpine” rather than “Arctic”. But the conditions are indeed rather similar. Finse is situated 1222 m above sea level and above the local tree line with a glacier nearby. It is a beautiful place and only four hours from Oslo by train. If you have seen The Empire Strikes Back some of the snow scenes were filmed at Finse, although you don’t see much of it except snow of course…

Why yes, yes I do! These are perfect to add to my wish list and I will buy the Ritter if it doesn’t appear for Christmas or New Year! I had heard of it, even, but never spotted a copy, so very excited it’s being republished.